THE NEW LOOK
Meet Dior Makeup’s Peter Philips, the man who creates some of the brightest, boldest catwalk looks and trends each season
You may not have heard of Peter Philips, but the way you do your face is likely to reflect his work. The creative and image director of Dior Makeup, Philips comes up with the beauty looks for the shows as well as the creation and formulation of the brand’s make-up lines, bringing backstage products such as primers, contour kits and lip-perfecting glosses to mainstream attention. ‘Not everyone wants to be fashionable,’ he says, ‘but everybody wants to be beautiful.’
We are on the set of our shoot in Paris, where Philips is meticulously creating a perfectly glowing canvas of the model’s skin as he discusses his glittering career. ‘I’m a kid of the Eighties who headed straight into fashion, which I studied at Antwerp’s Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts,’ he says. ‘I became a dresser and stylist, and understood how clothes and a good concept could blow people away. Backstage at Martin Margiela, I saw how make-up took things one step further – it made people happy. Beauty was so personal, it was a solution, it was empowering.’
So Philips took an evening cosmetics class and began working for free as a make-up artist for up-and-coming photographers and designers, including Raf Simons, his fellow student at the Académie. Philips’ agent would also book him for paid commercial jobs on ‘reader makeovers’ in Belgium’s teenage magazines. ‘I could see, then, that real beauty was not just about an image, but about women, which was an entirely different approach. I was dealing with their insecurities: the little pimple or the thin lips. I loved that line between beauty as a concept and as a solution, and I’ve wanted to keep it that way. I feel as much passion and pleasure working with real women as I do on fashion shows.’
It was this balance between vision and realism that went on to inform his creative approach. Having made his name working on magazines ranging from The Face and i-D to the major glossies, he was signed up by Chanel to be
its creative director of make-up, a role he occupied for five years, working closely with Karl Lagerfeld, before moving to Dior in 2014.
It’s hard to overstate Philips’ significance in the world of beauty. He has been responsible for some of the most striking fashion looks of all time – from the oversize red lips at McQueen’s A/W 09 show and the studded eyes at Dries Van Noten S/S 18 to the surreal Mickey Mouse he drew on the face of a male model on a shoot with Willy Vanderperre, an image used in the first issue of V Magazine and as the cover for a book, The Fourth Sex, edited by Raf Simons.
During the course of his career, Philips has worked with photographers including Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, and all the supermodels, from Kate Moss to Christy Turlington. Before the era of retouching in the late 1990s, he says, the skin and make-up had to be ‘immaculate’. As a result, ‘we had so much time on shoots, not just to create perfect make-up but to forge relationships with each other. You can see that in those images. It was an art form – these girls knew how to work a dress, their face, the light. The Supers were tough cookies, they lived for their art and it shows in their photos.’ As an example, he cites one particular shoot with Linda Evangelista. ‘She wore a latex suit, which looked like torture, and had to throw things around herself on set. She worked for hours without ever complaining, but when we took her gloves off, she was soaked in blood and obviously in a lot of pain.’ And he sounds boyishly thrilled recalling a Pirelli shoot with Sophia Loren. ‘She arrived with her hair in rollers and her own make-up, but allowed me to touch it up – I would have kissed her feet if I could. She was the nicest woman and when she spoke to you, it was as though you’d been touched by gold stardust.’ One might say the same of Philips and his palettes.